Announcing Pegasus Frontend

Rookervik

From what I've heard, you can make the front end look any way you want. Add menus, add animation, full layering support. Shader support (like CRT-Pi and such). You should also be able to access Wifi setup and some other Raspberry Pi settings from the menus of the front end.

nitrogen_widget

what about C.H.I.P. ?
It's only single core.

meleu

@fluffypillow please, consider making an on-screen keyboard. ;-)

InsecureSpike

this looks and sounds, pretty promising!
really looking forward on how this will turn out, great going!

ABrugsch

Yay! C++
My native language :)

ABrugsch

@nitrogen_widget said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

what about C.H.I.P. ?
It's only single core.

Same as pi 1/0
I'm sure it'll compile just fine as long as there are no pi specific dependencies which it sounds like there aren't. I can give it a try (when I get back from easter...)
This might be perfect for my chipstation portable :)

fluffypillow

@mattrixk

You can do whatever kind of layout you want - the layout is part of the theme too. Here's movie cover-like layout I've just hacked together: https://snag.gy/ma15Yk.jpg
At the moment, you have to manually set the width/height of the cells, which you can fine tune by adding some logic; for example in the video I've set the number of columns to 5 when the current platform is NES. On the long term, I'd like to make the sizes of the cells dynamic, so you could just set a max width or height and it'd align properly.
Currently front/back/spine/full 2D boxart, cartridge/disc image, logo, Steam grid image, fanart, multiple screenshots and videos. I can add more if you wish.

@nitrogen_widget it looks like both the regular and the pro CHIP uses Mali GPUs, like the Odroids, so yes, it should run fine and fast.

@meleu Ok!

EctoOne

I would love to to see the possibility to merge different systems into one. I have only a handful of Roms for Game Gear, Master System, Mega Drive and Sega32x and really wish I could merge them into just Sega. Since this seems so highly customizable, I would probably would use only one System and try to recreate a Kodi Skin.

InsecureSpike

what language will the Theming/Skinning/Layouts be in?

meleu

@InsecureSpike

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Pegasus uses QML/QtQuick2 for the UI

fluffypillow

@EctoOne this sound more like something you would set in a gamelist file; I could add support for something like a <systemGroup> tag, where you'd put <system>s you want to handle together. Or a special system attribute, if we want to maintain strict ES2 compatibility.

InsecureSpike

@meleu said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

QML/QtQuick2

thank you, whats it like to learn?
sorry it's a little off topic,
i have very limited coding knoledge, can pick things up pretty easily tho, can anyone recommend any reading material?
thanks

BuZz

@fluffypillow nice one :-) Look forward to trying it.

nitrogen_widget

@ABrugsch Thanks.
I got attractmode compiled on my chip but it was dog slow and i couldn't get sfml with accelleration to compile.

emulationstation was a little laggy on chip.
was considering advmenu but if this works....

fluffypillow

@InsecureSpike well QML itself can be used for a lot of things, so it can look very complex at first. It can even be used for writing mobile games or web browsers, but fortunately for theming you won't have get familiar with all the components. In my opinion, the somewhat harder part is setting up the scrollable/moving elements (like a grid or a cover list) the way you want. After that, styling the elements is easy.

I'm going to write some tutorials when it gets released, in the meantime you might find this guide useful.

InsecureSpike

@fluffypillow awesome, thank you

A Former User

I'm really impressed. I've tried Attract Mode on my Pi, and it's kinda hard to use, at least for me, so I'm ready to see a new frontend.
I'm also excited to make some themes for this as well. :D
One thing though: Will it be an easy setup for the Pi? I don't want to go through the hassle of changing so much code and stuff.

fluffypillow

@itsnitro in practice, a Pi release should "just work". The only problem is that Debian/Raspbian currently uses an outdated, 3 years old version of Qt, from which a bunch of features and optimizations are missing. As such, I'll include the required Qt libs with the releases, and also host the build tools and libraries too if you want to build on the board or cross compile.

fluffypillow

This week's main features:

added bezel, marquee and flyer image asset support
added support for all ES2 game metadata tags
gamelist reading and asset finding speed optimizations: currently loading ~1000 games, all with videos, box front, screenshot and logo takes less than 2 seconds on a Pi 3, and less than 10 seconds on a first gen Pi 1; these numbers may improve later
improved asset loading speed, added loading screen and loading indicators
implemented basic custom theme loading support
confirmed video support working on Pi 3 and 1

lilbud

@fluffypillow said

less than 2 seconds on a pi 3

alt text